An electronic document is a document existing in electronic form that is accessible by computer technology. The electronic document may have a variety of file formats, examples of which include, but are not limited to, Portable Document Format (PDF), Microsoft DOC format, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format, Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, Microsoft XLS format, Tag Image File Format (TIFF), and other file formats that can be associated with the electronic document.
Sometimes, the electronic document includes one or more hyperlinks pointing to one or more hyperlink destinations. Upon clicking a hyperlink, a program application is launched to open the content located at the hyperlink destination. To differentiate a hyperlinked content from the remaining content within the electronic document, the hyperlink may be displayed in a different color.
An example of a hyperlink destination is a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URL is a global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web (www) and is a string of characters conforming to a standardized format that refers to data on the Internet by their location. An example of a URL is http://www.xerox.com/products/index.html.
However, when the content containing embedded hyperlinks is printed, the hyperlinks are not highlighted and the hyperlink destinations are not listed anywhere in the print out as reference links for offline readers. Since the embedded hyperlink destinations are not printed with the content, information regarding the hyperlink destinations is lost in print. A user reading the printed content may therefore not be able to identify the hyperlink destinations. This limits/blocks the referencing capability of the reader and he has to rely on the original soft copy of the electronic document.
It may therefore be advantageous to provide methods and systems to enable the user to identify and access the hyperlink destinations embedded in the print content, without having to refer to a soft copy of the printed content.